Pandit Birju Maharaj and Ustad Zakir Hussain
“A Magical Evening of Kathak Dance”
June 1, 2008
Palace of Fine Arts
San Francisco, California
by Rita Felciano
copyright @ Rita Felciano, 2008
Watching two masterful Indian artists engage hands, feet and spirits in joyfully disciplined freedom is probably as close as we can get to an inkling of “divine play”, the Hindu concept of creation being a process of the gods playing. The occasion was the 70th birthday celebration of Kathak legend Birju Maharaj for which he was joined on stage by the equally virtuosic tabla player Ustad Zakir Hussain. The two men, one a generation younger than the other, mesmerized the sold out Palace of Fine Arts with their joyful response to each other’s musical and rhythmic challenges. To make the difficult look as easy as a slight of hand is surely the sign of mature artistry.
The evening was presented by the Tarangani School of Kathak Dance in San Jose whose director, Anuradha Nag, is one of Maharaj’s former students. She had produced a similar, highly acclaimed concert in 2003. The festivities started with gracious greetings in the Lobby and the offering of sweets, daps of perfumes and breath-freshening candies. The South East Indian community decked out in gorgeous silk--dhurtas and kurtas for the men, saris and lehengas with cholis for the women—showed up in force. They sat through a three-and-half hour concert with nary a defector. Their responses clearly demonstrated familiarity with this refined North Indian art.
Throughout spontaneity ruled. Though observing given parameters, the performers improvised. There was no printed program because the producers didn’t know what would be presented. The evening felt like an extended jam session whose participants relished being with each other. At one point, Maharaj’s disciple Swapna Saswati Sen, a fine artist herself, asked him from the stage to sing one of his compositions and to play the tabla. The program ended when Maharaj decided it was time to quit.
Though there was a singer (Debashis Sarkar) and a sitar player (Chandrachur Bhattacharyajee), and later a second tabla player (Utpal Ghoshal) sharing the dais with Hussain, the first part of the evening was an intimate and exuberant conversation between him and the man whom he so clearly idiolizes. At times Hussain was positively illuminated as Maharaj teased the younger man into keeping up with him. I began to get the feeling that I was not so much watching a performance as witnessing two spirits engaged in something larger than themselves.
Maharaj is a practitioner of the Lucknow school of Kathak, often described as more lyrical than other styles. Whether gentleness is part of his personality or something that he has acquired over the years, I don’t know. But everything this small-boned artist touched was infused with a light spirit. Barely moving from his spot, he suggested vast universes. His spinning torso was no more impressive than his fingers spinning a thread. His arms wended like tendrils, his feet sounded like lapping waves. Shuffles, clicks and vibrations suggested images. I heard rolling thunder, galloping horses, accelerating motors but I also saw butterflies and sunrises. One of the bols, he called a telephone number; he finished dancing it with a hand-to-ear “Hello.”
Even though the patterns could be blindingly fast, they remained crystalline, and they were exquisitely phrased. Virtuosity didn’t become an end in itself. Once in a while he would throw off a particularly intricate passage with a flourish of an arm and the most insouciant here-goes-another-one smile of satisfaction.
The program interspersed pure music and dance with story telling, most notably the classic episode of the child Krishna stealing butter, getting caught and properly scolded for it. Maharaj captured the god’s mischievous nature, his frolicking friends and the housekeeper’s loving exasperation with such detail that even for someone not that familiar with the intricacies of Kathak’s mimetic vocabulary the story became legible. Unless I am mistaken, he also set the tale into an environment with all kinds of flora and fauna. In the Peacock Dance, his arms initially seemed heavy with the weight of the feathers but, circling around he stretched them into huge ever more buoyantly looking wings, ready to take to the air.
In addition to Sen, dancer Mohua Shankar also had accompanied Maharaj. The two women performed two of his compositions, originally created as playful teaching tools. Beating out their responses to the bols with their feet, in one of them they played a game of hockey, in another they threw an imaginary ball at each other. Sen also exquisitely performed one of Maharaj’s poems about a story in which Radha impersonates Krishna, is admired by her friends and finally caught by him. Almost working like a sculptor, she added detail upon detail to complexify the characters, switching back and forth between them to spin out the narrative.
The program opened with a dozen students from the Tarangini School, the more experienced ones in saffron, the younger ones in blue. Delicate and transparent in their intersecting patterns, they also had been given the freedom to develop individual responses to the sadness of Krishna’s departure and the gratitude of his having been with them. Lyrical and thoughtful, these young dancers were lovely to behold.
At the end of a very long but most satisfying evening of Kathak, Maharaj announced that he was glad he had come and that he would like to return soon. Did the audience explode in anticipation? Of course, it did.
Photo: Birju Maharaj by Anuradha Nag